Suppose, come election time, the Government was to employ a private company to bundle up all our paper votes, haul them off to an unknown location for counting in secret before emerging with just the final, unverifiable result. Would you be happy?, asks Kathy Sheridan.
I should think not. You might even see it as a war-like attack on our democracy. Well, the big news is that we are within six months of acquiescing to something not far off that.
The only difference is that the votes will no longer be paper and the secret counts will take place within computers. The computers will obey coded instructions, devised by fallible humans from a private company, specifically for the Republic (so therefore not tried and tested elsewhere). Yet their source codes will not be open to independent, specialist scrutiny because of commercial copyright. Furthermore, the count results produced by them will not be open to independent verification because, astonishingly, no such means of verification is built into the system.
Do something as mundane as book an airline ticket or make a banking transaction and if someone mucks up, a paper trail will lead to the source. But press a button to vote for, say, Emmet Stagg and there will be nothing, anywhere, to prove that your vote did not actually go to Paddy Malone. What it means is that in this most cynical of eras, when it comes to exercising a most sacred trust, Martin Cullen is asking us to trust the lads, just trust them.
Say you're an extreme left-winger whose seat, the lads have just announced, has gone to a ruling party member by a margin of four votes; or that the party towards which you confidently predicted a swing has seen its vote collapse. What can you do?
Bugger all, under Martin Cullen's system. There will be no paper trail. And why not? Because "it would flout a Supreme Court ruling protecting the anonymity of an individual vote", he says. Can anyone explain why, with the brains of the universe at his disposal, this cannot be overcome?
Eamon Gilmore asked him before Christmas to give a guarantee to the Dáil and the public that the proposed electronic voting system is "100 per cent secure, safe and not capable of being corrupted in any way".
"I am perfectly satisfied on all those counts," Mr Cullen replied and effectively declared the debate closed. Astonishing.
Margaret McGaley, no Luddite but a scholar working on a PhD on electronic voting, had just told a Dáil committee the system as planned "poses a genuine threat to our democracy". Zerflow, a company hired by Mr Cullen's own Department to carry out a security assessment of the proposed voting machines, had warned that they could be easily tampered with and is standing by that warning.
Meanwhile, in other democracies, experts have been unequivocal in their opinion of unverifiable electronic voting systems. Rebecca Mercuri, an American professor and world expert in electronic voting security, says that "any first-year computing student can write code that displays one thing on the screen to the voter but records something else and transmits that as the vote."
The only solution, she believes, is a system which produces a paper record of the ballot that can be verified by the voter before it automatically drops into the system. These would then be available for checking if results are disputed or if - to confirm the unimpeachability of the electronic system for the citizens - recounts of the paper vote were performed in one or two random constituencies.
In the US, since the hanging/dimpled/pregnant chads fiasco and the consequent rush to electronic voting, political momentum is gathering for a bill to support a paper trail.
A terrifying New York Times report on Diebold, the leading maker of paperless, touch-screen voting machines, revealed that its source codes were so insecure that copies were stolen and posted online. Confidential internal emails laid bare one Diebold employee's sad dilemma: "Our department is being audited by the County. I have been waiting for someone [in Diebold] to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16,022 when it was uploaded." Reply: "I suggest you fake it."
Oh, by the way, Diebold's is headed by a Republican fundraiser who writes letters to wealthy Bush contributors vowing to "deliver" his state's electoral votes to the Bush campaign.
Credibility in this system is now so lacking that an opinion-former such as Gore Vidal declares that George Bush cannot lose the election if it's electronic and lacks a paper trail.
And all this comes before the inevitable clamour for the "progression" of electronic kiosk voting towards e-voting proper, such as by Internet, telephone or digital television (all experimented with in last year's UK elections and dismissed as an "abomination" by Ms Mercuri).
The truth, say the experts, is that no one can vouch for the 100 per cent security and independence of any company's system.
How then, can Martin Cullen do so, on your behalf?